Divergence
by Crumpled Thoughts
Summary: He was a lost soul, a wounded man. She was a free spirit, a healer of her time. When the intricacy of the situation has befallen, he realized he wanted her. But his fears were growing, as much as his love was. Now it's all up to her to decide.


**Divergence**

Written by: _Crumpled Thoughts_

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"_Be angry, then…Curse my words.  
I tell you, No man that walks upon the earth  
Shall be rooted out more horribly than you."_

_-Teiresias, Oedipus Rex_

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**Disclaimer:** I don't own GA. I properly disclaim even the use of quotations from the famous Oedipus Rex.

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**Part 1: The Curse**

The truth doesn't hurt, but it suffocates.

When you see frolicsome kids running around chasing one another, or an old couple sitting intimately close together under the perched bench in front of their old house, you would instantly know how exuberant their lives were.

They don't have to experience reckless pain made by some ancient mistake that still lives now. They looked tremendously happy that you wouldn't trace the struggles they each own suffer silently. But it was another way around. It suffocates me. Because I can feel their pain.

Those rambling little kids who would fell forward and scraped their knees—the physical pain of numbing senses and the witnessing of blood out of it—I knew that feeling; I had felt that feeling not more than several times. I was so used to it, it's almost normal.

But the internal agony?

That I can't bear.

I had seen that old couple when I was younger fought because the man was having an affair with another woman. I didn't understand it before; I was too innocent by the malice of the world but I had certainly felt the pain of the old woman—the struggle in all those years all mended by the love she had for him. I could only shook my head when I saw them together again leaving the house one afternoon.

The woman I saw now did not mirror the woman I had seen before weeping because of her husband. It was terrible because they had come to the point that they almost set a divorce. But looking upon them now, I could only shake my head at the irony of it all. They were sweeter than ever and have kept it until they were withered by old age. Love actually played a big part on that.

"Natsume." I heard a cold voice from behind me and saw my mother looking at me sharply.

I slanted my gaze to avoid her but hurried back inside the house to meet her. She wiped her wet hands from her apron and held her hands on her waist as she waited for me, looking as if I am still a kid that she could control.

My mother is one megalomaniac person. She was a strict woman of mid-thirties with a frizzy jet black hair that she tied in a low ponytail and piercing cold gray eyes that never cease to show detest on me. She wore skirts that are too long for her, probably past her ankles and never change it until the end of the week. She seldom smiles and most of the rare times I would see her lips upturned, are during the times when she'd hit me—square on the face with her rough hands.

I wouldn't have understand before, the look in her dead eyes when they met mine or the hard slaps she'd give me every single day of my life. But being able to know and feel her pain, as I grow older, it makes sense. It was anything but normal—having to know how much loathe she had for me.

She was too harsh on me for the past years of my existence. When I was still a kid, she never wanted me to play with anyone or to even spend time outside the house. She'd lock me inside our house with her drunken self to accompany me as she kept on lecturing me about shits in life.

She even warned me about the outside world. She told me it was dangerous. And I didn't understand it all back then.

Well, how would a five-year old boy who only wanted to play with other kids outside understand the intricacy of her words or the wariness of her warnings?

But that was thirteen years ago, I am turning eighteen in the next few months and she knows that I have been on the right age to know of the world. I didn't want to press her about it and I don't want her to know either that I was looking envious at the normality of people around me. She says I was different. But she will add that I'm just like any ordinary boy out there. It was what she told me. But inside, I knew I wasn't normal.

"I told you that you shouldn't stay outside." She scolded me.

I brushed past her into the house without saying anything and she followed me so crankily, wearing an unreadable scowl on her face. I sat on the couch wearing my emotionless face and stared past her, waiting, gauging, taunting.

She didn't look to happy at the coldness I've shown. I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts that I didn't even notice that she has reached me already. Before I know it, she has stepped in front of me and gave me a loud slap on the face. I froze, stayed immobile while waiting more from her. She will always slap me whenever I did something that she didn't like, so I was used to it. I waited for more. And when I didn't receive any, I looked up at her and saw her chocolate brown eyes holding back the tears she couldn't expel. I held my stinging cheek with my hand and didn't say any word.

"I told you that you shouldn't stay outside.." her voice was full of accusation, and dread.

"I need to see the world." My voice was low but I know that she'd heard me.

"The time will come, when you can see the world and be free from it." Her wide brown eyes looked scared, her voice was hysterical.

"Mom, stop it." I said calmly.

"You disobey me, Natsume! You dare disobey your mother?" she was looking at me in disbelief. Horror colored her face.

"I need socialization.." I wasn't able to stop myself from saying, "I can't live just feeling all your pain. I need other people so I can be normal!" my voice was a bit raised, trying to emphasize a point that I know she wouldn't notice.

"You are not normal!" she spat on my face in detest, "You have to live feeling all my pain..all of it. That is why you existed. That is why you are born.." strong hatred was present in her voice. It made me cringe.

I could feel the pain hammering in my chest again as I look at her. If only it was this easy as it sounded. I could have endured physical pain more than this. How can I be normal if every single day I'll hear her painful cries about how she didn't want me in her life?

I have not had a perfect childhood or a perfect life to be proud of, you see. My mother hated me since the day I was born. And she probably hated me even more after she learnt of my extraordinary ability of sensing other people's pain. But maybe, it also helped her have her way with me. She used it as a weapon against me. She made me feel her pain. It was unbearable and I couldn't even imagine I could survive it.

It was probably my strong determination to live that evoked me this willpower to get through every time she would burst.

"I know you hated me..but please, let me live." I was already pleading.

She was my mother but she didn't really act like one. I am merely staying by her side not because I love her. Her presence alone had made me hate her. I hate everything about her, how she'd helplessly cry on the floor wailing about how unfortunate her life was, how she'd tell me she loves me and I was her only strength—to which she cannot say without the accompaniment of liquor, how she'd spat at me those words I always dreaded to hear and even how she uses many strategies to make me feel her suffering. She was inflicting me an unbearable pain that I had long been immune at. I had grown to be cold and numb on everything—she had made me an emotionless monster that will never feel any positive emotion.

"I gave you life..and I am making you live! What is it that you didn't want from your life?" she asked me, her words baffled by tears.

I wanted to tell her that _she_ is what I don't want from my life. She hated me, and I hated her. The feeling is mutual but our reaction opposed just the same. She wanted me to suffer; I wanted her out of my life. They are two different things that Kami hadn't allowed to happen aside from the first. I was getting sick of it and I don't want to stay living this way. She was making me live in this hell that perpetuates only her goal.

"I wanted to be free.." my voice trailed, icily.

I earned another heavy slap from her, "You cannot be free.." she cried in anger, "What? You are planning to leave me? You are going to leave me like the hell of your bastard father did to me when he knew that I had you? You cannot leave me!" she said hysterical and I was just in time to enclose her in my arms calming her down.

"Shhh. No one's going to leave you, Mom." I stroked her hair gently calming her. My arms rigidly enclosing her in my arms. She thrashed everywhere but I kept my hold on her firm.

"Don't leave me..Don't leave me.." she chanted like a mentally stressed woman. Well she is.

"I'm here..I'm here.."I kissed the crown of her head to hush her down and gently rocked her until she falls asleep in the verge of her tears.

I could have left her alone and try to elope and have my freedom. I could have left her to mend for her broken heart and I could even abandon here right at the moment. After all, it is what I wanted to do from the very beginning. But I couldn't swallow the guilt that has me coming in the way. If the pain is unbearable, what more is the condemnation from my own conscience will be? She had been a bad mother to me. Never once did I felt that she loved me. Never once she brought me outside the house. We have never done things together except when we'll have a session.

That session was every afternoon, when she'll tell me how much she hated me and she'll start making me feel her pain. It was the only thing we do together. The rest, I do alone. When I was young, she had tended for me as well. She stopped taking care of me when I was five. But for those five years she had taken care of me, I didn't feel the gentleness in her caress or her love when she put me to sleep or when she tend for my needs. She was doing it all because she was responsible for me. She was doing it so people wouldn't condemn her for being a reckless mother. She didn't do it because she was being a mother to me; she was doing it because that is what the society wants her to do. And by not leaving her, I was repaying her with an equal responsibility. I will be taking care of her not because I want to be her son, but because the society tells me that I have to act like a son to her.

I carried her and put her gently on the couch when her whimpering died down and she closed her eyes. I could have hated her but she's still my mother—the woman who bore me without her wanting. I walked myself in the kitchen to get a glass of cold water to calm my trembling nerves. I gulped down emptying the glass and putting it in the sink before going back to the living room where I have left her.

I stared at her sullen, perished figure and let a tear escaped my eyes. I wasn't any normal teenage boy out there. I don't live a perfect life. I don't have a perfect family. And I was a fruit of an unwanted pregnancy.

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**Crumpled Thoughts says:** Sorry for the typos. Don't be a silent lurker. I don't bite. Tell me your thoughts. : )


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